Self-Absorbed Fractal Storm System Cause For Concern, Speculation

[Editor’s note: The following article draws largely from a de-classified, edited report supplied by the SED. SDNews cannot independently confirm the veracity of its contents.]

Discussion at the Freeloader bar was interrupted Thursday night by the arrival of a miniature, apparently free-willed cyclone of winter weather. Occupants at the time included Azure, diminutive blue fox and ranking Freeloader officer; Cadge-Tuesday,  possessed non-anthro squirrel and disembodied spirit soul mates; Darius, ferret; Natasha, cartoon coati; Ping, small toon mouse; Valleyminks, chaotic entity of uncertain enumeration and pedigree; Xor, protean boolean construct at the time of this writing; Zenkuro, remotely operated vulpine cyborg; and Zeta, engineered albino squirrel and SED member.

The miniature funnel cloud displayed a moderate interest in these occupants of the bar but devoted the majority of its attention to the creation of images of branching trees, ferns, and other self-similar fractal images rendered in frost and the study of similar images created by the bar’s patrons. However, the cyclone behaved in a “sullen” manner when encountering the limitations imposed by the modest resolution of its frost medium, breaking one of the bar’s glass mugs, and reacted to the defacement of a Sierpinski triangle with a minor tantrum, tearing a napkin into a trail of confetti pointing to the southwest.

After expending much of its energy in these acts of creation and destruction, a much diminished storm (now little more than a soggy rain cloud) drifted out, beckoning Natasha and others to follow with a wispy tendril.

Natasha, Zenkuro, and Zeta left in pursuit, and followed the small puff of weather to Mare Proximus, where a tremendous, fearsome storm system was gathering on the coast. Having led them there, the much diminished storm cloud gained more than its former strength from the gales, and quickly froze a bridge of ice deeper into the storm before joining it.

SED satellite imagery revealed a small hurricane, apparently a “gestalt” storm system composed of a series of smaller funnel clouds composed of still smaller storms. A layer of cumulus clouds hanging over land and sea obscured activity within its large eye, requiring a ground level observation.

Trusting to cartoon resilience, Natasha made her way directly through the storm system with only moderate frostbite,  windburn, and electrocution while carrying a secured Zeta in her coat pocket; Zenkuro arrived unscathed in the eye of the storm via drop pod. They were joined by Pyralis, relatively amicable planet leech.

Within the storm, the four bore witness to a further self-referential display played out on the cumulus clouds. Patterns in the clouds seemed to describe aspects of SpinDizzy’s artificial weather system, including wave forms for dawn and dusk, tides, imagery and equations corresponding to the system of heat plates and turbines used to control its meteorology, and patterns of rainfall, usually rendered as wave forms and often literally imposed on the waves of the Glimmersea.

Most unusually, the weather programs depicted in the cloud formation included the very weather program used to generate these depictions. In other words, the weather pattern contained a copy of its own program, and at one point, generated a cloud rendering of an overhead view of SpinDizzy’s present, tumultuous weather, including a smaller map.

More troublesome, however, was the repeated imagery of houses, trees, and vehicles being blown upwards by tremendous winds, accompanied by vector renderings of impossibly strong lifting winds. Zenkuro noted that the recent weather oddities correlate with the arrival of four unidentified, metallic objects in the planetoid’s atmosphere. Zeta speculated that the arrivals might be some fractal-obsessed intelligence, stranded on SpinDizzy and seeking a means to achieve escape velocity.

It remains unclear whether present weather anomalies and hijacking of the planetoid’s meteorological engines represent a call for help (as the small, beckoning cyclones that have been reported following residents of SpinDizzy might suggest), or a catastrophic, fractal weather program designed to carry four castaways back to the heavens (and a good chunk of the planetoid’s vital machinery with them). But the observers agreed that all signs point to the answers being at Mare Proximus and in the Weather Center in SpinDizzy Control.